Hi,
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Travis Oliphant <travis@continuum.io> wrote:
>> On Feb 14, 2012, at 3:32 AM, David Cournapeau wrote:
>>> Hi Travis,
>>>> It is great that some resources can be spent to have people paid to
>> work on NumPy. Thank you for making that happen.
>>>> I am slightly confused about roadmaps for numpy 1.8 and 2.0. This
>> needs discussion on the ML, and our release manager currently is Ralf
>> - he is the one who ultimately decides what goes when.
>> Thank you for reminding me of this. Ralf and I spoke several days ago, and have been working on how to give him more time to spend on SciPy full-time. As a result, he will be release managing NumPy 1.7, but for NumPy 1.8, I will be the release manager again. Ralf will continue serving as release manager for SciPy.
>> For NumPy 2.0 and beyond, Mark Wiebe will likely be the release manager. I only know that I won't be release manager past NumPy 1.X.
>>> I am also not
>> completely comfortable by having a roadmap advertised to Pycon not
>> coming from the community.
>> This is my bad wording which is a function of being up very late. At PyCon we will be discussing the roadmap conversations that are taking place on this list. We won't be presenting anything there related to the NumPy project that has not first been discussed here.
>> The community will have ample opportunity to provide input, suggestions, and criticisms for anything that goes into NumPy --- the same as I've always done before when releasing open source software. In fact, I will also be discussing at PyCon, the creation of NumFOCUS (NumPy Foundation for Open Code for Usable Science) which has been organized precisely for ensuring that NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and IPython stay community-focused and community-led even while receiving input and money from multiple companies and organizations.
>> There is a mailing list for numfocus that you can sign up for if you would like to be part of those discussions. Let me know if you would like more information about that. John Hunter, Fernando Perez, me, Perry Greenfield, and Jarrod Millman are the initial board of the Foundation. But, I expect the Foundation directors to evolve over time.
I should say that I have no knowledge of the events above other than
from the mailing list (I say that only because some of you may know
that I'm a friend and colleague of Jarrod and Fernando).
Travis - I hope you don't mind, but here I post some links that I have
just found:
http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2012/01/transition-to-continuum.htmlhttp://www.continuum.io/
I see that you've founded a new company, Continuum Analytics, and you
are working with Peter Wang, Mark Wiebe, Francesc Alted (PyTables),
and Bryan Van de Ven. I think you mentioned this earlier in one of
the recent threads.
In practice this gives your company an overwhelming voice in the
direction of numpy.
>From the blog post you say:
"This may also mean different business models and licensing around
some of the NumPy-related code that the company writes."
Obviously your company will need to make enough money to cover your
salaries and more. There is huge potential here for clashes of
interest, and for perceived clashes of interest. The perceived
clashes are just as damaging as the actual clashes.
I still don't think we've got a "Numpy steering group". The
combination of the huge concentration of numpy resources in your
company, and a lack of explicit community governance, seems to me to
be something that needs to be fixed urgently. Do you agree?
Is there any reason why the numfocus group was formed without obvious
public discussion about it's composition, remit or governance? I'm
not objecting to it's composition, but I think it is a mistake to make
large decisions like this without public consultation.
I imagine that what happened was that things moved too fast to make it
attractive to slow the process by public discussion. I implore you
to slow down and commit yourself to have that discussion in full and
in public, in the interests of the common ownership of the project.
Best,
Matthew